Lalith Dhammika Mendis
Education is the lifelong process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits for personal advancement and growth, and for the advancement, development, and betterment of society.
Education takes place in informal settings and formal institutional environments, such as schools, universities, and a wide variety of institutions of learning. In today’s context, education predominantly refers to the process of institutionalized learning, considered an indispensable aspect of the upbringing of children.
Golden Quotes on Education
Albert Einstein (AE), one of the greatest theoretical physicists ever to live, was also a great thinker in the history of mankind. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1926 for the groundbreaking discovery of the photoelectric effect. His revolutionary discoveries include the Theory of Relativity. Although he was a late bloomer, his groundbreaking discoveries revolutionized human understanding of the universe and modern physics.
AE believed that education is an exceedingly powerful transformative force that can shape individuals, societies, and, in turn, the world at large.
On education, Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”.
Albert Einstein did not consider education to be a process of memorizing facts and accumulating knowledge. He said education goes beyond them and entails creative thinking and independent thought. It focuses on fostering critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills that equip individuals to analyse, fathom, and comprehend the complexities of the world and its phenomena.
Importance of Education
Education creates socio-economic value and cultural renaissance and generates enduring impact. It offers sweeping transformative powers to individuals, societies, and countries through innovation, advancement of knowledge, and fosters a wide spectrum of skills and competencies crucial to achieving socio-economic progress. Education is the process of upskilling people in a wide spectrum of disciplines that enable people to play roles in professional, managerial, and administrative occupations in a wide gamut of spheres from engineering, medicine, accounting, legal, architectural, information communication technology, and a host of other areas considered as white-collar positions. It also equips individuals to play productive roles as technicians across a wide spectrum of technology-driven fields in modern industries and high-tech service sectors, as mechanics, plumbers, machine operators, electricians, and more, which require hands-on skills and technical know-how. More advanced roles in modern technology include information technology technicians, automation technicians in robotic automation, skilled technical support assistants with diagnostic and troubleshooting abilities, etc.
Education is a process that moulds individuals to play a wide spectrum of productive roles in economic value creation, and more comprehensively, is designed to develop human capital, enhance the productive employability of individuals to create sustainable economic value, whilst fostering social, cultural, and personal advancement of people.
Institutionalized education (IE) that prevails today
Today, the institutionalized education system is akin to a mechanical process that produces people to play stereotypical roles in a wide variety of disciplines and spheres. It is easily comparable to a factory production model designed to turn out a wide array of standardized products that meet predefined quality standards to serve targeted needs. The implementation entails a strictly monitored tiered progression, through multiple stages with stringent quality controls to ensure the attainment of desired quality standards in the final output. This system enforces compliance and fosters adherence and proactive adoption. It determines the scale of achievement and success through the level of managerial proficiency attained by those who succeed as proficient and qualified to be employable in a smorgasbord of recognized occupations, jobs, careers, and professions.
IE is typically mechanical. Its approach to a significant extent is rote-based and has a robot-like functionality. Its approach evidently lacks stimulation to trigger independent thoughts, kindle questioning minds, foster creativity, prompt intelligent curiosity, and vitalise innovation to harness the latent potential of human capacity. Despite that, IE offers a limited scope to develop critical thinking, strategic vision, and problem-solving skills within a defined framework of the lore of accumulated knowledge, skills, and exposure gained through theories and principles, and the like learnt.
IE, through the narrow lens, a means to attain gainful employability and materialistic progress
Our society is witnessing an alarming competition to secure the limited number of plum positions available in the marketplace. Every parent’s dream is to see their children qualify as doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants, or in a host of other professions that command social status and enable employability in occupations/professions associated with greater social recognition and financial rewards.
Thus, when a child is born, the quest begins with efforts to secure admission to a prestigious school, followed by the need to qualify for higher studies to obtain recognized top-tier qualifications. The quest for high academic achievement and professional advancement is narrowly viewed as the enabler of socioeconomic well-being. People are thus driven to secure financial rewards and plum perks enjoyed by so-called educated elites.
This phenomenon propels youth to accomplish materialistic advancement at the expense of human values. This has led to the formation of a multi-layered, socially stratified society in which those at the top rungs of the hierarchy command greater respect and enjoy very high perks. People are thus segmented based on education, wealth, income, occupation, and social status. The resultant lack of social cohesion leads to anomalies, friction and the creation of societal silos.
The crisis faced by society today
Society is witnessing human values, morals, ethics, etiquette, and principles giving way to crass commercialism. The siloed society is in ruthless competition, asking for a pound of flesh and more.
When people are exhorted by unbridled desire, ruthless urge to compete, entrenched avarice, and aggressive, uncompromising stance to attain selfish gains, benefits, and profits, even at the expense of others’ detriment, their self-centered greed takes precedence over principled thinking, empathy, equality, fellow feeling, compassion, generosity, care, and humane considerations.
When a whole spectrum of competing demands emanates from social silos and segments with heightened ferocity, society runs into turmoil, and social unrest ensues. Every social silo, ranging from educated elites to the unemployed and underemployed segments, considers its demands as a top priority over the rest.
Thus, society is engulfed by moral decadence. There is widespread corruption, even at the higher echelons of power, and lawlessness and heightened criminality. Corruption is so deeply entrenched, and it has become the viable shortcut and” Sine-Qua-Non” to circumvent rules to achieve desired results. What prevails is the rule of the jungle. Integrity has become a rarity. Respect for values has taken a back seat in the face of mounting urge to achieve ends by hook or by crook.
Importance of instilling Einsteinian philosophy in education
AE said education is training the mind to think. He advocated imagination rather than conformance. AE valued imagination more than the accumulation of knowledge. He advocated intelligent or epistemic curiosity, which encourages questioning phenomena over passive acceptance of facts, situations, etc, as they are.
The education system prevailing today needs reforms that foster questioning minds and out-of-the-box thinking. Incorporating activities that stimulate children to think beyond rote memorization and curriculum-based, structured, regimented learning with defined goals, to explore real-life phenomena, question what is unfolding, and fathom issues. Hence, bringing forth these aspects into curricula from the very early stages of pedagogy would stimulate independent thought and intelligent curiosity in young ones.
This could be achieved by presenting simulated scenarios to tackle real-life conundrums that require thinking beyond what is taught in books. Such practical activities could be conducted as group exercises to promote collaborative behaviour to find solutions to common issues.
The world is riddled with crises that continue to exacerbate faster than we think. It faces the potential impact of unpredictability more than ever. Sri Lanka needs nonconformist creative thinking beyond accepted, rule-based wisdom to find better solutions than relying solely on run-of-the-mill ideas. This is an integral part of Sri Lanka’s plan to enhance resilience.
What Sri Lanka needs from education in this context goes far beyond producing stereotypical professionals, technicians, and the like who can engage in a wide range of roles. The education process should thus be reformed to produce resilient human capital – people with skills and proficiency in disciplines with adaptable capacity to meet unforeseen challenges stemming from unpredictability.
Journey of educational reforms
The implementation of educational reforms is a gradual process. It should be a process of materialistic and ethical value-based enrichment of individuals. Whilst materialistic advancement through higher qualifications enables people to obtain greater financial rewards, ethical value-based enrichment makes them socially responsible citizens who respect and conform to ethical principles of conduct.
This requires visionary thinking and a paradigm shift in how people should be groomed through education to become socially responsible and productive citizens.
Inculcation of ethics, morals, and socially responsible behaviour as an integral part of evolving pedagogy
A well-planned process to instill humanitarian values and ethical principles in individuals from a very young age should take priority as an integral part of formal education. Ethical principles designed to foster important humanitarian traits include integrity, preserving human dignity, alleviating suffering, promoting common well-being irrespective of race, caste, religion, social status, and political affiliation, centred on equality, compassion, respect for human rights, and especially those of vulnerable communities and marginalized segments.
These human considerations would help enrich the lives of young ones from a tender young age and contribute immensely to a paradigm shift in human relations and social conduct over the long term. What needs to be highlighted is the vital fact that materialistic enrichment alone, through the highest possible level of academic/professional attainment, is of no consequence unless the spiritual values of human beings are cultivated and nurtured. The quest for wealth, power, and status at the cost of moral decadence has given rise to a materialistic culture characterized by ballooning consumerism. The source of many social maladies and moral depravity that have led to large-scale frauds, mega acts of corruption taking place in high echelons of power, a growing trend of criminality, a widening scale of drug peddling, and widespread bribery etc can be traced back to dissipating human values signifying societal decay.
The world-renowned business tycoon Warren Buffett said that “Three things could be looked for in a person, such as energy, efficiency, and integrity. If the third one is absent, do not bother about the rest”. This highlights the incontrovertible truth that individuals with the highest level of knowledge, skills, and capacity are inconsequential unless they possess human values.
Education in this regard acts as a foundational and long-term remedy to instill human values from the early stages of the lives of individuals by encouraging focus towards character building, inculcating integrity and ethical reasoning, cultivating values such as honesty, accountability, empathy, and equity as part of learning, besides the accumulation of knowledge and skills. It can also include targeted programmes of instruction and demonstration to help young people to resist anti-social behaviour and abstain from devious conduct as part of their upbringing as responsible citizens.
Education as an instrument of creating social equality
Widening the scope of formal and recognized avenues of qualifications available to include a variety of sectors to cater to young people who fail to succeed in qualifying for higher education opportunities to pursue studies in medicine, engineering, law, or accountancy, etc., in universities or other recognized institutions of higher learning, offering qualifications that enable employability locally or overseas. This could be one way to address highly noticeable inequalities that persist in society today.
Sri Lanka plans to increase its income from tourism, and novel skills related to tourism promotion and development, such as those in the hotel industry, may attract young people, provided there are gainful employment opportunities. Qualifications in the hotel industry, event management, tourism management, and digital marketing, etc., could be made available to those willing to secure job placements. State intervention in establishing institutional arrangements through public-private participation to offer recognized qualifications targeting jobs that require modern skills is a case in point.
Another area with vast untapped potential is indigenous medical tourism, a growing niche. It can be used to attract foreigners to offer age-old, time-tested, unique treatments through non-surgical, non-invasive medical interventions to treat various medical conditions, including non-communicable diseases.
Sri Lanka is endowed with a unique and unparalleled wisdom in a wealth of precious ancient medical therapies and herbal-based treatments, that offer robust solutions to some of the medical problems, including life-threatening ones, afflicting the world today. Although there are advanced methods of Western medical treatment, some issues remain unresolved, with no permanent solutions in sight. Chiropractic treatment, such as musculoskeletal care for a host of orthopedic conditions, and holistic therapies that include oil baths, herbal applications, and traditional massages, as well as detoxifying therapies, offer very powerful products that would be appealing to foreigners and, if marketed properly, could attract them in large numbers.
This writer has personal experience in how some people, including those of older ages, recovered after suffering serious fractures, acute injuries, dislocations, shoulder injuries, and a tear in the cartilage, etc., after receiving the herbal and oil therapies practiced in Sri Lanka. These recoveries were much faster and appeared miraculous, since people were able to live their normal lives afterwards as if nothing of the sort they endured had ever happened.
There is always the strong possibility of combining Medicare with detoxifying recovery for foreigners. These services could be packaged into marketable products with vast potential for exponential growth, as the world is increasingly facing a heightened rate of health problems.
Youth could be trained in the skills necessary to provide services in this sector with attractive perks and incentives.
These are only some areas where attractive opportunities could be developed to employ and empower youth, as a measure of bringing about some level of social equality; many more can still be explored.
Education to build capacity for disaster preparedness, mitigation, and resilience
The lives on the planet exist on a ticking bomb. The harmful impact of global warming is felt strongly across the world. Global warming accompanies extreme weather events such as flash floods, prolonged droughts, etc. The global temperature is rising, driven by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are also increasing. These events accompany devastating consequences. Cyclone Ditwah, which smashed Sri Lanka, caused colossal destruction. Scores of houses, buildings, and commercial establishments suffered severe damage. Public infrastructure too experienced huge damage.
It is essential to recognize that extreme weather will occur more frequently with added ferocity in the future. This requires a very high level of preparedness and robust measures of prevention, management, and mitigation.
To ensure that young people grow as responsible citizens, it is important to equip them with skills and knowledge as to what this phenomenon is all about, how it originates, how to face it, and its hostile impact with greater resilience, and how mitigatory and preventive measures could be implemented. The educational curricula must include modules that teach schoolgoers about global warming, its causes, its implications, detrimental consequences, and remedial and proactive actions in prevention, preparation, management, mitigation, and recovery. Also, the study programmes should include practical activities to exemplify what is meant by carbon-neutral and environmentally friendly behaviour, sustainability practices, and how they help mitigate and prevent catastrophic events. Adherence to sustainable practices to preserve the environment and nature for posterity should be highlighted as the topmost duty-bound social obligation of every individual. Schoolgoers should be encouraged to adopt sustainable practices by incorporating them in school activities to demonstrate their importance, so that they will adopt them.
Environmental sustainability deserves to be treated as a topic of utmost importance to be incorporated into mainstream education. It is nothing but adherence to environmentally responsible and friendly behaviour and practices in all anthropogenic activities that help planet Earth remain a place conducive for life to exist.
Education has an indispensable role in moulding human behaviour to ensure the survival and well-being of life on the planet.
Young people are the future of this world. Sri Lanka, in its endeavour to reform education, could rise to the occasion by incorporating vital initiatives in pedagogy, so that young people will grow as responsible citizens with steadfast commitment, knowledge, and skills to preserve the environment and ensure the long-term survival of life.
Support for educational reforms
The government of Sri Lanka should ensure adequate financial support for the education sector. It is observed that funds allocated to education in the annual budget are below the international norm of 6% of the GDP.
To initiate reforms meaningfully, it should not be constrained by a lack of financial resources.
The funds set aside for education should not be treated as an expenditure. It is an investment to usher in an era of Thriving Nation, A Beautiful Life.
